Istanbul Crossing

Ahdaf dropped a coin in the tip bowl and left the hammam. The hectic street quickly robbed him of the languidness he had enjoyed stretched out on a hot marble slab. He dodged pushcarts and deliverymen, some shirtless in the warming day, and jumped out of the way every time a boy, clinging to the back of a wagon piled high with boxes, shouted warnings as he hurtled down the hill with nothing more to brake him than his heels in thin sandals.

It wasn’t any less chaotic inside Leyla’s Café. People—mostly dark men like himself with some amount of facial hair—sat around small tables, their voices raised competing to be heard, arms flailing the air as they acted out the stories they were telling. A tobacco cloud hung overhead, abetted by the men puffing on shishas that sent up drifts of sweet, tangy smoke.

Ahdaf squeezed between tables and dodged outstretched legs to reach the cowboy bar, a short counter in a cubbyhole so nicknamed because, on the walls around it, Leyla had tacked pictures of Hollywood’s most celebrated cowboys and nailed a line of cowboy hats to its overhead arch. Its three stools were predictably empty. Beer was acceptable to be drunk at the tables, but for most customers, sitting at a bar drinking beer or anything else suggested they embraced elements of Western culture, a direct affront to popular fundamentalist notions. That didn’t stop them, however, from recharging their phones with the power strips that Leyla had laid out on it. Only one socket was available, and Ahdaf claimed it before someone else did. His charge was in the red zone, down to a suicidal three percent given that his own life depended on his battery’s life.

Leyla stubbed out a cigarette and flipped her black hair off her shoulder. “Are you coming from the hammam?”

“How can you tell?”

“You smell like soap.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s better than you smelled yesterday.”

“Was it bad?”

“You’re not wearing your usual blue shirt either.”

“I washed it. This is my back-up while it’s drying.”

A stranger, pushing up to the bar, said, “Sounds like you could use a third shirt.” He was older than Ahdaf but not by much. He could’ve passed for Turkish but something about him said he wasn’t.

“I only have two hangers,” Ahdaf replied, not looking at the man, not wanting to engage with anyone.

“Tea?” Leyla offered him.

“Tea?” She knew Ahdaf would want a beer. Then it dawned on him, maybe there was something amiss about the stranger and that was her signal. “Yeah, and with an extra sugar,” he said. “My body weight tells me I’m undernourished.”

“That’s an extra lira.”

“Okay, no extra sugar. I don’t want you getting rich off me.”

Leyla laughed. “Get rich off you? I couldn’t get rich off all you guys in here put together, no matter what I was selling!” She dropped a third sugar cube into his glass. “On the house.”

Ahdaf frowned as he stirred his tea. “We had jobs in Syria. I could’ve made you rich then.”

The stranger offered his hand. “I’m Selim Wilson. Sam if you prefer.”

“I’m Ahdaf. Why would I prefer Sam?”

“It’s what I was called growing up.”

“You changed it to Selim?”

“My mother’s Turkish. Selim is on my birth certificate.”

“While you guys decide on his name, I’ve got other customers,” Leyla said.

“Before you go, do you have cold beer?” Selim asked.

She looked at Ahdaf when she replied, “Only one is cold.”

“I only want one.”

“It’s mine,” Ahdaf spoke up.

“You’re drinking tea.”

He took a last sip and pushed the cup aside. “I pre-ordered the beer. Very cold.”

“I tell you what, you guys share it.” Leyla uncapped the bottle and planted it between them, along with two glasses, and squeezed around the end of the stubby bar to serve tables.

“It’s all yours if you want it,” Selim said.

“Of course we’ll share it,” Ahdaf said.

“Then I insist that it’s my treat.” Selim angled the glasses as he poured to produce only thin heads of foam. He passed one to Ahdaf.

“Thanks,” he said and took a sip. “Are you American?”

“Is my accent that obvious?”

“It’s an accent. I like to know where people are from.”

“It’s American,” Selim confirmed.

“If you’re an American, you must know some of these guys,” Ahdaf remarked, referring to the cowboy pictures Leyla had tacked to the bar’s walls. Overhead, she’d nailed cowboy hats along the curve of the arch.

“I know who a lot of them are,” Selim replied.

“Have you been here before?” Ahdaf asked.

“Occasionally.”

“I’ve never seen you in here and it’s my office.”

“Obviously we work different hours.”

“I’ve also never seen another American in here.”

“I’m Turkish American. Maybe that explains it. Or maybe the fact that I wanted to meet you.”

Ahdaf’s internal alarm went off. He’d met lots of strangers at Leyla’s. They were his clients, and her café was his meeting place. Selim was somehow different. “Why’s that?” he asked.

“I’ve heard you get things done.”

“What things?”

“Moving people.”

“Who told you?”

“A lot of people could have told me.”

“But who did? I like to know how people find me.”

“He. She. It. I don’t remember.”

“Why the secrecy?”

“I need a reliable route for people to escape.”

“Escape what?”

“Turkey.”

“So you’re a smuggler, too?” Ahdaf, his heart racing, feared he’d entered a danger zone.

“Not like you, or why would I need you?”

“You don’t need me. Lots of guys do what I do.” Ahdaf checked his phone. “It’s charged enough,” he reported and dropped it into his daypack. “Are you CIA?”

“I can’t say who I work for. Not until we have an agreement.”

“Then I guess I’ll never know. Thanks for the beer.” He slipped off the barstool.

“Just remember, Ahdaf Jalil—”

“How do you know my name?”

“What you call ‘moving people’ is trafficking to the rest of the world. Turkey could deport you back to Syria. Back to Raqqa and ISIS.”

“Why have you come looking for me?”

“I told you, I want your help.”

“I don’t want to help you.” Ahdaf stood to leave.

“Take this.” Selim forced a business card on him.

“I don’t want it.”

“Sometime you might need help. Not everyone is a nice guy like you.”

Ahdaf glanced at the card. No name. Only a telephone number with a local prefix. “It’s your number?”

“Not exactly.”

“Do I ask for Sam or Selim?”

“You don’t ask for anyone. You leave your name and a message, and where to find you if you need help.”

“I won’t need help,” Ahdaf said, but stuck the card in his pocket anyway. “Thanks for the beer.”

“Maybe next time I can treat you to a meal.”

“I’m never that hungry.”

Ahdaf made his way to the door of the lively café. He knew some eyes trailed him. Nobody’s business was entirely private since most of it was conducted on the street. Everybody kept an eye on each other and not always to be helpful. Selim hadn’t said he was CIA, but he was somebody like that, and probably somebody in the café knew exactly who he was.

The door hadn’t closed behind him before his phone started ringing.

###

An hour later, Ahdaf was pacing the loading dock at the central bus station. The family was late. Nothing had been easy to arrange for them because they insisted on traveling all together, not letting the father go first to establish a beachhead where the others could join him. For Ahdaf, that meant more seats on a bus, more lifejackets, more spaces on a raft—all of which were in heavy demand. It was mid-autumn, and already on some days the weather made it treacherous to cross. In another month, it would be an option only for the very desperate.

Ahdaf had bribed the bus driver to save seats for the family. He tried to promise the same service to all his customers, and he pretty much could. He’d learned which drivers he could trust to save the seats until the door hissed and closed. If the family missed the bus, it would mean new tickets, a new bribe, and they would blame him for not holding the bus. Or at least most clients blamed him, though this family was especially nice. He was glad he could help them.

He checked his watch.

Ten minutes.

Ahdaf looked around. The driver wouldn’t wait for anybody. Certainly the seat jumpers wouldn’t. The instant the door hissed preparing to close, the passengers standing in the aisle would wrangle for the three vacant seats, claiming maladies they didn’t have to assert their priority to sit down.

The driver blew the horn. Five-minute warning.

Ahdaf caught his eye through the windshield. They exchanged shrugs. He didn’t know where the family was, and the driver was waiting for nobody.

Then there they were, joggling along the platform looking for the bus to Assos, rushed and encumbered; an infant in her mother’s arms, the father and teenage son hauling rucksacks.

“Here!” Ahdaf waved to catch their attention. “HERE! HERE!”

They hurried up to him.

He chuckled when he saw Meryem’s inflated belly. “You weren’t so big yesterday,” he said.

“You told us to make her look more pregnant,” Yusuf, her husband, reminded him.

“And you sure did!”

Two toots of the horn. The two-minute warning.

“Call the number I gave you as soon as you get off the bus. Your contact will be waiting for you.”

“Who is it?” Yusuf asked.

“I never know. You have a backup number if there’s a problem, and if there’s still a problem, call me. Here, take these.” Ahdaf gave them bright pink caps with sun visors. He even had one for the baby.

Issa, a lanky fourteen-year-old with a wispy moustache, looked askance. “I’m supposed to wear a pink hat?”

“It’s the only color they had. Besides, you won’t care when you get to Lesvos and have to walk seventy kilometers in the hot sun.”

Meryem paled. “We must walk seventy kilometers? I really am pregnant.”

She looked woefully at her husband, who said, “I’ll carry you if I have to.”

Issa put the cap on backwards, having to really pull it hard over his mop of curly black hair. “It’s too tight!”

“Tight’s good. You won’t lose it if there’s wind.”

“Wait,” the teenager said, and turned the cap around to pull some hair through the band in the back. “Cool or uncool?” he asked Ahdaf.

“Very cool. It’ll never fall off.” Ahdaf caught the driver’s eye again, who nodded. Time to board.

“Thank you again, Ahdaf,” Meryem said, and did an unexpected thing for a Syrian woman: she kissed him on his cheek. “You are a kind man to help my family.”

Yusuf grasped his hand with both of his. “You’ve helped save my family,” he said.

“It’s you who saved your family. You got them away from the war. I’m only helping a little.”

They touched their hearts and Yusuf followed his wife onto the bus.

Issa, the last to board, pointed to his cap.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Pink?”

“You’ll be glad to have it, pink or not. Besides, you might start a trend.”

The boy grinned. “Cool. Thanks for helping my family.”

They shook hands before Issa bounded up the steps to sit across the aisle from his parents in the front row. As they all waved goodbye, the driver stared at Meryem’s pronounced belly. He glanced in the rearview mirror to ask the passengers, “Is there a midwife on the bus?”

Ahdaf heard a few nervous laughs as the door hissed and closed. The driver backed out of the bus bay and drove off. Ahdaf waved again though he couldn’t see the family through the glazed windows; but perhaps they saw him, and he knew how every act of kindness, no matter how trivial—if only the offer of a piece of sesame bar—could nurture someone’s hope that what lay ahead mightn’t be so bad.

He left the bus terminal and ran to catch the tram when he saw it pulling up. It wasn’t full and he sat by the window watching shopkeepers in the last throes of the day: dragging merchandise inside, flicking off lights and lowering squeaky metal grates. Only the cafés had customers. Ahdaf felt deflated—how else to describe it?—whenever he sent people he’d grown to like into unknown hands and an uncertain future. He had learned it was possible to bond with other refugees very quickly because that’s all the time they had. Yusuf’s family, too, had felt the bittersweetness of the moment. Meryem’s kiss on his cheek was so telling of that. It made Ahdaf smile, thinking she probably wished she had made herself appear a little less pregnant to have more room on the narrow bus seat, but the ploy might win her some sympathy if she needed protection or a helping hand. The family’s journey had already been tough. Ahdaf had made the same one, coming from Syria mostly on foot and braving scoundrels along the way. But unlike Yusuf’s family, he opted to stay in Istanbul. He felt safe enough there and anonymous when he wanted to be.

Or was he? How did the CIA man—that’s how he thought of Selim even if he hadn’t admitted that he was—know so much about him? He even knew his last name; but then Ahdaf realized, half the people at Leyla’s could’ve told him. It was odd, though, if he’d come around asking questions about Ahdaf and no one mentioned it. On things like that, someone always had your back because they expected the same protection.

Like many of the young guys who hung out at the café, Ahdaf played a minor role in one of many smuggling networks. He moved people arriving in Istanbul to Assos, a sleepy village five hours away on the coast, from where they’d cross the narrow channel to Greece. He organized bus connections, space on rafts, lifejackets, overnight stays if needed, special needs (replacements for lost crutches in at least a dozen cases); and always passed on instructions for his clients’ onward journey. He wasn’t much more than an efficient gofer. All the young smugglers who hung out in Leyla’s were gofers, not the bosses who paid the bribes and bought the rafts that he and their other minions filled with desperate passengers. Ahdaf had no idea who the bosses were. It wasn’t like there was a corporate headquarters somewhere he could visit and meet the team. It was managed by cell phone, and only in-person when money needed to be exchanged or a gofer disciplined. That didn’t mean that he didn’t hear the abusive stories from up and down the line; the worst, in his mind, money paid for services never provided. It was a life changer for refugees to have to come up with that money again. People counted on it to buy them a few weeks to straighten out their new lives wherever they eventually landed. Their future had been stolen from them; or at least, the start of it. The abusive stories weren’t about Ahdaf, of that he made sure, but he couldn’t risk trying to stop others. He survived in an edgy world, which translated meant easily dangerous verging on lethal.

“Next station Aksaray,” a recorded voice over the tram’s intercom announced. “Aksaray. Next station Aksaray.”

Many people got off and Ahdaf followed them. It was a popular neighborhood, meaning working class, and a magnet for refugees, too. Families sat in clumps on the sidewalks, some ever-alert to begging opportunities but the majority just huddled in what little space they could find. For most, living on the streets was a fraught adjustment after losing their claim to middle class. Many of them could have been Ahdaf’s mother, an English teacher, or his father, a dentist, because they too had been teachers and dentists, or simply housewives who’d been enjoying modern luxuries like dishwashers until their neighborhoods were bombed. They had fled, none under Ahdaf’s special circumstances, but for reasons also threatening enough to uproot themselves and embark on a dangerous journey. Not everyone survived and they knew that when they started out, but their odds were worse if they remained behind.

Ahdaf resented the whole vocabulary of human trafficking and Selim had almost called him a trafficker. He didn’t traffic people. He smuggled people because they wanted to be smuggled. Along a long chain, he moved them one link. If they could have done it themselves, they would have, but they needed help and he didn’t exploit them. The guys running the rackets made the money, which he always collected, but with his meager cut he barely got by. It was only enough to keep him working for them as a foot soldier in an ever-growing army. People who’d already passed through sometimes sent word back to new refugees to seek out Ahdaf. At least for one leg of their journey, they could be sure someone wasn’t going to steal their money. They’d feel safe because safety was what Ahdaf had sought for himself. He would never buy an oligarch’s palace on the Bosporus, so why not be an honest man?